I love this sweater! If spring had not come, my friends would have had to stage an intervention to get me out of it. “Danie, it’s been five days now, don’t you think you should let the sweater air out a bit?” To which I would reply, “Naaaah.”

I do feel like the pattern was hard to follow for me, which is not usually the case. I admit though, that my knitting mojo was suffering at the time. But I felt like the pattern kept me wondering if I had skipped a step with the cable pattern and its width expansion. I just didn’t feel confident in the place I was even though I understood the overall direction the pattern was taking.

My true measurements are as follows: (in inches)
Bust: 33.5
Hips: 35.25
Waist: 28.5

I knit this in a DK weight, so did some calculations as my gauge was 4.9 sts/inch. I started heading towards a 2 inch positive ease, but I think I stopped just short of that, probably between 1.75 and 2 inches. I usually knit my sweaters with a 1.5 negative ease, so this made me very nervous.

I stopped in between two sizes because I kept trying it on to assure myself of the fit. I stopped where I was comfortable, but felt that the sts for the arm and the sts for the body were at a different ratio to my body, so I cast on sts under the arm, which the pattern does not have you do. I liked having the extra sts in the body, but didn’t need them in the arms and had to do some dramatic decreases just under the arm holes. Hindsight clearly shows that I could have done my body and arm increases at a different ratio or moved over more stitches from the arms to the body, but it’s all water under the bridge now and all is well!

I did have to drop down during this sweater to fix the cable pattern. I was one stitch off, but had pulled it back and restarted it (incorrectly) three times or so, and thus decided that it was probably right and I should just move on and it would line up and look fine as I went on (which it most certainly did not). So I looked at Stephanie Pearl McPhee’s article on fixing cables. I felt confident and fixed it with no problems. I dropped 3 stitches at a time rather than dropping the whole section at once (see photo #2).

I was worried that because of the dk, the pocket would be much higher than I wanted it, but I did as the pattern said and it turned out fine. However, after I did the 3-needle connection, I knit another cable pattern repeat to make the sweater longer. I did not continue to increase the cable pattern, but just took it straight down. I did the welt in a US4 for about 6 rows and then bound off using the Jenny’s Super Stretchy Bindoff as I always bind off too tight.

As I mentioned above, I needed to do some drastic decreasing. After I got to the desired number of sts, I knit 2 inches from the armhole, then continued to decrease 1 st on the 8th row. I knit the sleeves a little longer than 3/4, and they feel a little long, but I think if I would have decreased more at the bottom, I could push them up a bit and had them stay. But they are fine overall.